"It's very substandard," she says. "Most respectable universities and after all Sydney is our oldest and most beautiful university in Australia, and it's my alma mater, does not have a proper gallery space."

The Chau Chak Wing museum is named after the Chinese-Australian property developer who donated $15 million for the new museum last year.

The museum will comprise the university's historic Macleay and adjacent Edgeworth David buildings, joined by a new extension, and cost an estimated $42 million.

It will house artistic, scientific and archaeological artefacts from the Macleay, Nicholson and University Art Gallery collections alongside works from the Power Collection.

The 6000 square metre museum will be designed by Johnson Pilton Walker architects and include gallery spaces, teaching areas and a venue for public events as well as an exhibition area for Chinese art and artefacts when it opens in 2019.

Sydney University's vice-chancellor Michael Spence told Fairfax Media last year the new museum would be comparable to the world's first university museum in Oxford.

"I'd draw a parallel with the Ashmolean in Oxford in the sense that it is also a museum that has a whole variety of things. It's not just a picture gallery," he said. "In the same way, this will have even more because the Ashmolean doesn't have ethnographic or etymological collections."

Samantha Meers says the museum redevelopment will give students, scholars and the community greater access to the university's collections.

Seidler, who graduated from Sydney University with an architecture degree in 1964, says she is thrilled about the museum development, which will create "a little arts precinct".

"And, of course, naturally I felt I should support it," she says.

Seidler has fond memories of student life at Sydney University, recalling drawing classes in the Nicholson Museum led by artist Lloyd Rees.

"My happiest memories of being at Sydney University are the quadrangle and having lots of coffee and conversation," she says. "We didn't drink much then. We smoked all the time.

Seidler pauses, before quickly adding: "Not drugs, you know, cigarettes. I mean, we didn't know then it was dangerous."